In this post, I want to think about what the popularity of multi-level marketing businesses among Indian Sign Language-using deaf Indians means for how anthropologists and other social scientists analyze deaf worlds. In the current political economic moment, many deaf Indians are turning to multi-level marketing businesses for both livelihood and for imagining new deaf futures. There is the sense …

Malcolm Gladwell’sNew Yorker article, “Man and Superman,” on genetics and performance in sport kicks off this month’s web roundup, where we ask the questions: Who is a superman (or superwoman)? How do we even go about defining the characteristics of a superman? How might we account for subjectivities in the search for superman?

Editor’s note: As part of our new series, Second Opinion (not to be confused with the SMA’s similarly titled newsletter) we ask two contributors to review the same book, respond to the same question, or comment on the same set of issues. For our first pair of Second Opinion posts, we invited two reviews of Eduardo Kohn’s new book, How …